Bride of Chuck (1998) Review

Ten years has passed since serial killer Charles "Chucky" Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) imparted his soul into a child's doll when his old girlfriend, Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) rescues his fan blade sliced parts from a police impound. She brings him back to life so they can be together but upon learning of his true intentions she locks him up. By true intentions I'm referring to the fact that he didn't intend to marry her. She's a serial killer too. Chucky escapes, murders Tiffany and reincarnates her as her own doll. Chucky then tells Tiffany just how they can both be human again. They must travel to New Jersey to where Ray is buried, dig up the body and retrieve the amulet we saw in Child's Play, Child's Play 2 and Child's Play 3. How it managed to be buried with his human body is beyond me since he used it over and over and said human body had been buried since the start of the first film. Anyway Chucky and Tiffany manage to trick young Jade (Katherine Heigl) and Jesse (Nick Stabile) to travel down to Jersey so they can take over their bodies.

Part of the biggest problem with this franchise is that they never truly explored the dark humor. Sure as Chucky killed someone he'd give some silly, little throw-away line and go on pretending to be just a doll. This was true for three movies until this film. Here they have officially accepted the ridiculousness of a child's doll committing a series of grisly murders. They have now finally realized that a film full of just horrible things is just that. A horrible thing. You must add humor, however dark to make the audience feel safe before you hit them with a scare. It's called playing your audience like a piano and it's one of the principal goals of a film. To affect your audience.

That being said. I have a few criticisms. As with the first few films it is largely a showcase for well-executed puppetry and visual effects than it actually is with any true ability for directing or acting with certain exceptions (Dourif has a voice like a garbage disposal and utilizes it to great effect and Tilly's scenes are oddly funny and a little twisted). Ronny Yu is a director whose filmography showcases some brilliantly made hits (The Bride with White Hair) and some utter flops of epic magnitude (Freddy Vs. Jason). Here he coasts slowly but doesn't wow me or make me hate his work in any way. Almost as though he's nervous of ruining a franchise that was already ruined. From Child's Play 3 (rock bottom) the only way to go is up. Perhaps that's why I don't hate as much as my past responses dictate I do.

Or perhaps it's the fact that I actually find Chucky, an animatronic puppet, to have more life and charisma than any of the other slasher villains. At the end of the day you want your audience to enjoy watching your villain despite all the horrible, awful things they may do. Jason is a hockey puck.

★★★

Jaws (1975) Review

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT!

This film begins very simply with an underwater camera cutting through an ocean. In between these shots of the deep we cut to a beach campfire surrounded by young teens. Two (eventually one of them falls down, too drunk to continue) of them run off for a late night swim. Naked, because that's what teenagers apparently do. While a young woman swims we cut back under the surface. In a shot that obviously references a similar moment from The Creature from the Black Lagoon we see her silhouetted body. She treads water for a few moments enjoying the ocean. This is when a pleasurable moment in the film abruptly becomes jarring. She is pulled under the surface over and over before being dragged from side to side, screaming in pain. We don't see what attacks her. Then she is pulled under one last time. The next day Amity Island Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is called out to investigate this woman's body (um half body). Much to his dismay, after trying to close the beaches, Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) informs him that Amity is a beach town and requires that all the beaches stay open. Brody relents but is proven right when a young boy is killed. During a town meeting with lots of angry shouting a hand scratches along a blackboard. That hand belongs to Quint (Robert Shaw) who demands ten thousand dollars to catch and kill the shark now terrorizing this town. While he ponders Quint's offer and reads book after book on sharks. Brody calls in a marine biologist, Dr. Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) from the Oceanographic Institute. Hooper examines the young swimming girl's remains and determines that she was killed by a shark. Immediately following this a tiger shark is caught by a group of fishermen. Hooper, who measures the bite radius, requests to be able to examine the shark for human remains but Mayor Vaughn, who's batting a thousand at this point, refuses to allow it. That night Brody and Hooper cut it open themselves. After several days and two more attacks Hooper, Brody and Quint go on a suicidal hunt of the shark on the ocean.

What the most impressive element is how Steven Spielberg mounts tension. The frightening moments in the film are not when the shark is attacking but just before. It's all about what you don't see. By utilizing underwater cameras he suggests the shark's movements and vision. Throughout the film he creates a pattern. The music rises with a point-of-view shot of the victim and then there's an attack you barely see. Multiple times throughout the film, just to throw you off Spielberg breaks the pattern. Sure the theme plays when the shark grows near but it is always two or three seconds after you believe it will be. It's the right way to terrify your audience and Spielberg knows this and the moment where we finally see the shark, almost an hour and twenty minutes in, it provides a major shock the first time you see it. Even after seeing it many times it still proves itself as a striking image.

The performances are strong here. Particularly the three leads. I've heard stories from Dreyfuss about how Shaw made his life a living hell on the set solely because Quint makes Hooper's life a living hell. I'm not sure how true those statements are but either way it's all noticeable. Of the three I'd say Shaw turns out the best performance. He'd later play a much similar character in The Deep (also based on a book by Peter Benchley) but both are strong performances. Part of Quint's backstory is that he served aboard the World War II Portland-class cruiser USS Indianapolis. He speaks very plainly about his experiences floating in the ocean for days while his fellow crewmen drowned, succumbed to exposure or were eaten by sharks. The speech, written mostly by Shaw, highlights just why Quint hunts sharks and is a rare moment of emotion from Quint. He hunts the sharks because the idea of being hunted and eaten by a shark terrifies him. This makes his desire to kill the shark and his ultimate demise all the more palpable. There is a tragedy to the way Shaw plays Quint and we are forced to feel sympathy for him.

My only criticism for the film is that, in one scene, we are given a jump scare but as with all scares like that. Once we recover it's out of our minds. Jump scares are not scary.

This film is often credited as the first real blockbuster. If only they'd left well enough alone and we wouldn't have to remember Jaws 2, Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge

★★★1/2

Carnival of Souls (1962) Review

A young woman named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) survives a drag race accident that had the car she rode shotgun in toppling off a bridge and into a river below due to no apparent cause. Oddly unfazed and uninjured (except for the fact that she hardly remembers anything) by this incident, the woman heads across the country to her new job as a church organist, a job that puts her near a peculiar carnival. She experiences a number of strange things during her journey, including but not limited to a gaunt, ungainly man's appearance in her car and boarding house window. Director Herk Harvey plays The Man. Mary discovers a peculiar and deserted carnival after the incident with the man and becomes obsessed by it and the secrets it may hold. Mary begins to suspect that her survival of the accident was not as it appears.

The film begins all too abruptly and ends without so much as a "how do you do?" or an explanation as to what the hell you just watched. It raises more questions than its mere 84 minute runtime can answer and skips over whole scenes that might provide the audience with enough information to at least infer what the ending was. The biggest problem is that of Mary, who is a cynical, uncaring human being. Her friends (we assume they're her friends) both perish in the car accident but she shows no signs of survivor's guilt. She just starts off on her journey to Utah. She works as an organist at a church but hardly takes any stock in religion. To her a church is simply a place of business and only does what she does for the money. Her loner actions hardly make us care enough about her losing her mind. We get the sense that she wouldn't care if we were in her Twilight Zone wannabe situation. The film's tagline is, "She was a stranger among the Living." Never has a truer statement been said by a film marketing.

I want to talk about the horrible, terrible no good acting in this film. Every bit of dialogue spoken has the inflections of a bad dubbing. As far as I know the film was recorded in the English language. The only remotely good performance is by Harvey who never speaks. None of the people in the film are trained or established actors and Hilligoss herself only appeared credited in one other film. That was in 1964's The Curse of the Living Corpse. There's no reason to suspect that her performance in that film is any better. Just so you know it isn't.

Carnival of Souls is a pointless exercise in the mundane and illogical although it's far better than the 1998 remake.

★

Night of the Living Dead (1968) Review

Brother and sister, Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbara (Judith O'Dea) visit their father's grave in a small town in Pennsylvania. When a re-animated zombie kills Johnny, Barbra runs into a farmhouse to escape. There she meets Ben (Duane Jones), a quick thinking, resourceful man with a plan. After a very brief zombie attack, Barbra and Ben learn that they are not the only ones in the house. Hiding in the cellar were Tom (Kieth Wayne), Judy (Judith Ridley), Harry (Karl Hardman), Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and Karen (Kyra Schon). Tom and Judy are boyfriend and girlfriend while Harry and Helen are the parents of Karen. Ben quickly takes charge much to the chagrin of Harry. They make a series of plans to control or escape the bloodthirsty, undead horde on their doorstep and must put aside petty differences in order to survive.

Every cliché you can possibly think of in any zombie movie ever made can easily be traced back to here. The zombies are slow, dull-witted creatures who travel in innumerous groups. The only way to kill them is a bullet through the brain or a heavy blow to the head. The recently deceased must be burned to ashes quickly or they will re-animate and become simply one of the undead. All of this information is related to our characters, and us by extension, through a series of radio and television broadcasts. This helps to expand the scale of the situation without ever having to leave the farmhouse or the central characters. One imagines that many of the events unfolding on the screen are happening a few miles up the road somewhere.

The most important thing about any zombie film is that it be about the human characters survival. Making your characters be zombie hunters whose only purpose is to kill zombies is boring. What did they do before their current situation? What do they do when it's over? How prepared were they for the zombie apocalypse? The best thing about this film is that it is, more than zombies, about a group of seven people surviving a series of horrible events. The character backgrounds in Night of the Living Dead aren't described in any real detail. They all speak briefly about how they came to be at the farmhouse but not any earlier than the zombie's appearance. Still, through their interactions with each other we learn all we need to. You know that these people would have no interactions outside of the house if they could help it. Least of all Harry (who's a pompous ass) and Ben (who's our hero).

A random factoid that you probably didn't know is that Paramount refused to distribute the film due to its black and white cinematography. Thankfully it's still in black and white. Cinematographer George A. Romero (who also serves as editor, director, writer and producer) shows us the outside world as a bright warm world but anytime inside the house is slathered with light and dark shadows. It creates a feeling of claustrophobia and an eeriness that most "trapped-in-a-house" movies forget to have. We're stuck in this small place with people and are not going to be able to leave until it's all over no matter how much we might want to. The gore, which is very tame by today's standards, is given an extra. Red blood is now an inky black and the grisliest of wounds are covered up by the dark shadows I already mentioned.

This film both re-invented a genre and gave it its own additional subgenre that has now been done to death. Get it?

★★★★

Friday The 13th Part 2 (1981) Review

WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

A thought occurred to me as I saw the events of Friday the 13^th Part 2 unfold. This has to be where the whole entire subgenre of beautiful and stupid people in beautiful places being hacked to death has come from. Well, maybe not. This must have been the first film to solidify it. After all this is one of the first "slasher" sequels. This film was released the same year as Halloween II and fared a little better with critics. Not much mind you. Rotten Tomatoes gives Halloween II a 30% approval rating while this film has received a 33%. Truth be told this isn't even the worst slasher movie I've seen. That title belongs to Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter.

This film essentially takes off where the first one left us. We're given a series of flashbacks, which inform us what happened last time in case you missed it or just didn't care enough to remember, thanks to a nightmare of Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) the survivor of the first film. Incidentally Alice does not show any signs of a nightmare (turning her head side to side and whimpering emphatic and forced no's and pleases) until the camera has focused on her. I can't help but imagine Steve Miner, the film's director, standing beside the bed saying, "Okay, Adrienne remember. Don't react until I say so." Everyone knows that nightmares happen on cue. She's of course killed after a shower and while making tea by having an ice pick jammed into her temple by an unknown assailant (duh, it's Jason). We fast forward who knows how long. Camp Crystal Lake has been shut down however there is another camp nearby and on the same lake that is preparing to open. At least I think it is. The film doesn't make it real clear as to whether it will have visitors or just counselors for a training course. It doesn't truly matter. The purpose of these teenagers going there is so they can get drunk, arm wrestle, make out and go skinny dipping for no apparent reason other than to have someone get naked. After a couple of nights of debauchery and stupid decisions a killer in a burlap sack and plaid shirt (maybe the Elephant Man was a lumberjack?) begins picking these people off one by one until one survives.

Remember how I said that these were beautiful and stupid people? The stupidity is nearly overwhelming. In one scene two of them drive up to a gas station ecstatic that they found a gas station. They then proceed to run almost a block away to use a pay phone. Why not just park in front of the phone? It would certainly keep them from parking in a no parking zone to avoid a towing which happens and which they only care about enough to chase for thirty feet before they get a new ride to the camp. If it was me I'd get that ride down to the impound to get my truck back. In another scene a girl (our skinny dipper played by Kirsten Baker) searches for her dog. She calls the dog's name twice before another stupid but beautiful teenager tells her that lunch is ready and she promptly gives up searching for her beloved pet and skips lively to eat lunch. How did any of these folks reach their current ages? I guess it's easier to assume that they lived in bubbles.

I'd like to mention this for a brief moment. Over the course of the film's 87 minute runtime there are 12 people (pets are people too) killed. Three of them bite it in the opening flashbacks, one dog is shown disembowled and eight new airheads bite the dust. If you should happen to do the math that's approximately one dead being for every eight minutes of screen time. Just think if this was a twelve minute short film. There'd be a death a minute and the movie would be over after twelve minutes.

Can you tell I am in a bit of a biting mood?

★

 

Pet Sematary (1989) Review

Dr. Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff) his wife Rachel (Denise Crosby) and their two children move to a small town in Ludlow, Maine. For the first several months all seems well. They have a kind-hearted but mysterious neighbor named Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) and Louis has a good job as a university doctor. However, as is often with the novels of Stephen King, nothing is quite as it seems. Louis is haunted by nightmares of a patient he couldn't save (Brad Greenquist) and Rachel is terrified of the memories of her sister Zelda (Andrew Hubatsek) who died as a child from spinal meningitis. All of their problems boil down to one thing. The house in which they are now living is next to a pet cemetery. This cemetery leads to an ancient Indian burial ground that holds a dark secret. Bury the recently deceased and they will return. Despite the warning from Crandall a family tragedy (spoiler) causes Louis to do the unthinkable and has to learn the hard way that sometimes dead is better.

This film is easily one of the scariest, for me personally, films that I have ever seen. It never fails to evoke a feeling of dread and terror deep within the pit of my stomach. There's a subtlety and slow build to the horror that works excellent for, not just the film itself, but the characters. Everything from the music to the production design to the direction by Mary Lambert helps to create atmosphere. The film works much like a stone-lined path. You follow the warm, defined and inviting path into the woods and eventually go off the path until you are lost and terrified. The scariest thing about leaving the path is that we don't know what's in the woods.

I want to focus for a moment on the performance by Gwynne. Not a single line is wasted and Gwynne plays Jud as the type of man who knows everything about what's gone on in this town over the last seven or more decades and acts as the film's Greek chorus, warning the audience of the dangers and the potential for horrific events. The emotional involvement by Gwynne and the gut-wrenching scene in which Jud is, in a sense, confessing his sins to Louis is nothing short of extraordinary and I truly believe that Gwynne shed off any naysaying about his ability to play a multi-faceted, deep character. He was more than just a Herman Munster.

It's a didactic tale that deals with the nature of death. The grieving process is treated as a complex, human emotion and not as an entertainment aspect. This film deals with things we don't like. We don't want to read about it and we don't want to think about it. This film refuses to allow you to escape the harsh reality of life.

★★★★

 

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988) Review

When her great aunt dies unexpectedly Elvira (real name Cassandra Peterson), recently fired from her job as Horror Hostess of Elvira's Movie Macabre, travels to the small puritanical town of Falwell in order to receive her inheritance so she can pursue her dream of being a Vegas showgirl and forever leave behind the B-movie reviewing existence to which she finds herself. In order for her to do that she needs fifty-thousand dollars (something her game show imagination guarantees she'll receive). Upon arriving at Falwell she is met with odd looks, derision and hatred for her sultry appearance and her feisty personality. Not everyone hates her though. The town's young people find themselves enamored with her as much as the movie theater owner name of Bob Redding (Daniel Redding). The people who do however hate her make up the town's Morality Council including our villain and Elvira's great uncle, Vincent Talbot (W. Morgan Sheppard). Elvira is stunned to learn at the reading of the will that she does not receive fifty-thousand, five-thousand or even five dollars. Instead she gets a haunted house, a cookbook and a (soon to be) punk rock poodle. Elvira soon learns of her heritage and just why Vincent Talbot (an amalgamation of the names of horror icons Vincent Price and Lyle Talbot) wants the book so badly. I won't divulge the details as they are complete and total spoilers and I have not called spoiler alert.

Okay, I am completely aware of the fact that this film may fall more under the genre of comedy rather than the genre of horror. However due to the fact that, much like An American Werewolf in London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Tremors, there are horror elements mixed in well with humor elements. Besides that, OctHorrorFest is my baby and so I make up the qualifiers. Now.

This film is a wonderful celebration of any and all B-movies by the likes of Roger Corman (mentioned by name) and Ed Wood. Those films are "awesomely bad" and so was this. Guilty pleasures and Saturday afternoon entertainment. Camp-ridden is what they are meant to be and they succeed in their first and foremost purpose. To entertain. The work in this film shows that the filmmakers were in a charming, playful mood with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks. It pokes fun at the films it shows love of while becoming its own example. Nearly every character is increasingly entertaining, particularly both Chastity Pariah (Edie McClurg) and Uncle Vinnie Talbot who exudes a refined malice like Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi. From a physical perspective, Elvira, with that showgirl figure and that over-the-top tight-fitting low-cut black costume, just grabs your attention from the get go. But there's much more to enjoy than just her physical appearance. Her ditzy charm and irreverent off color sense of humor made me just love her and oddly root for her. There's no shortage of double entendre jokes which unlike most make one pause for a moment as you realize the implications and overtones.

Now, is it scary? At times. Is it funny? Yes. Is it perfect? No but then it was never really meant to be anything but pure cornball and I love it for that. I always know I can sit down, put this film in and forget any and all problems for 96 minutes and after all isn't that what movies are supposed to be all about?

★★★1/2

 

 

Evil Dead (2013) Review

"David (Shiloh Fernandez), his drug-using sister Mia (Jane Levy) and his friends Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci), Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) travel to an isolated cabin that belonged to his parents to spend a couple of days together. Mia promises to stop using drugs and Olivia, who is a nurse, promises to help Mia in her abstinence. They discover a hidden basement with witchcraft and the Book of the Dead, and Eric reads it (even though it says "Do Not Read From This Book") and unintentionally summons an evil force. Mia, Olivia and Natalie are possessed by evil and Eric reads the book trying to learn how to destroy the demon."

Anyone who has ever visited this blog and read the post above this one knows that I loved the original film. Its terror was just enough to keep me awake at night but there was an odd sense of fun behind it. As though Sam Raimi and crew were aware they were making potentially the worst horror film since Plan 9 from Outer Space. The new film, more a "re-imagining" then a remake, has no such sense of humor nor interesting or intelligent characters. It's torture porn. 90 minutes of abject horror, vomiting, stabbing, burning, slicing, shooting dismemberment. Let's be honest here my friends. Relentlessly throwing on gore for gore's sake is not an effective way to create suspense. No matter how good your effects are they will not terrify your audience. The building of suspense to a violent event is always more intense than the violent event itself. There is no build up in this film. We literally move from one mutilation to another to another to the end credits. These provide for plenty of shocks but very few scares.

Another necessity of good horror the film lacks is any sense of hope. The best way to torture your audience is to dangle that little sense of optimism in front of them and then yanking it away. Then giving it back and then taking it again. The filmmakers must've forgotten what it's like to play with a cat. It's only redeeming quality is that it ended.

I do wish I had picked a better film to start out OctHorrorFest but I didn't.

Zero Stars